Books I Read - August 2020

 I was hoping to write a little more regularly on here, but the one write-up I geared for the blog came out poorly so I need to work on it more. I'm hoping to finish the following posts before the end of the month:

• Ibiza visit
• Being outside the US in Summer 2020
• North of Spain visit

But we'll see. My podcasts post will be available here tomorrow. I decided to post it directly on the work blog.

Ok, enough notes for myself and my few readers. Here's what I read in August.

1. Stuart Berman, This Book is Broken (History), 

Broken Social Scene has been a source of periodic fascination for me since I got into music and heard about the band in college. I have seen them perform three times in two different countries - Boston in 2005, a small town in Spain in 2008, New Orleans in 2011 - and got to interview them at the Spain show. I have them in my mind sort of the way William Miller has Stillwater in Almost Famous, a band half a generation older than him through which he comes to understand music more widely. I didn't have any sense of disillusionment with Broken Social Scene, but they existed on a border between bigger-than-life rock stars and dudes (alas, mostly dudes) who you could see were full of shit but enjoyed anyway. It's been a long time since I've seen them, obviously, and I'm not following them uber closely, but it was a real joy to buy their most recent record, Hug of Thunder, even if it sounded like a new spin on the same record they had made three times before.

We're in a period of 00's nostalgia, and I am contributing to that with the first (and soon to be second) season of A Positive Jam, and that second season brought me to this book. Stuart Berman was living in Toronto as Broken Social Scene emerged, and knew the band as a friend, so he has good access to the many people involved. He took on the book as an oral history, with brief introductions leading to each of the chapters.

I'm a fan, so I like the subject. I also remember in my interview with the band, a year before this came out, a couple of the members pointed out that it was way too early to publish a retrospective on the band, one that dishes on their personal secrets (someone made a joke about how you should only talk about who's sleeping with who when you're old and unattractive). And I think, despite fascination that I and probably hundreds of other people had with the band, there's not quite enough here to stand for a full book. There aren't great revelations, and any revelations would not have mattered widely enough to be worth airing. It's a step above of a fanzine, and I liked it, but it's hard to recommend if you're not into the band, and even if you are, you probably remember a lot of this (the arrest of producer Dave Newfield in New York in 2005, I forgot about that until re-reading this, but yeah, that was an event at the time). 

The question that prompts for me is whether this would have been better written, say, now, where there's that nostalgia element and some of these things are forgotten. I doubt it from a commercial element - there probably wouldn't be the wider interest in this now. From an informational and artistic perspective, it's interesting to wonder about.

(Also, I have a huge blind spot in not being Canadian or in Canada's cultural milieu. So caveat lector).

2.    Preston Lauterbach, Beale Street Dynasty (History)

I believe this is the last of my Memphis specific books for the year. It focuses on the legendary Beale Street, but less so the music that emerged from there than the culture that allowed that music to emerge. The subject is the Church family dynasty, the Church family being Bob Church and Bob Church Jr.. They were a Black family, and their fortune was built on real estate around Beale Street, including bars, brothels, housing, and eventually a bank. The time period was the second half of the 18th century and the first third of the 20th, and the insight on what Black people had to go through in liberated, post-Civil War Memphis (and Memphis does appear to be relatively better than a lot of the country of the time). 

I expected and would have liked to hear more about the music itself, but that most likely reflects my own lack of due diligence about what this book would cover. Like a few of the other histories I’ve read this year, it felt like he had to stretch his materials to pull together a cohesive story, but this flowed reasonably well and had a thesis on which it delivered. 

3.    Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street (Biography)

In last month's post, I proposed a theory on biographies being either first biographies that compile all there is to know about a subject from primary sources, or second biographies that are more analytical and distant from the subject itself. 

This book, a biography of Jane Jacobs, is a pretty good exemplar of what the first biography should look like. The sourcing is good and exhaustive, including letters, interviews with family and friends, and a thorough accounting of Jacobs's life and career, especially before Death and Life of American Cities came out. The picture is a little glossy, but there may be fewer skeletons in the close for Jacobs to be criticized with. Kanigel does call out the more legitimate criticisms that Jacobs received, including her blindspots on race and class and the gentrifying effect that her preferred city policies could have.

 The writing itself felt 'hearty' to me, as if being read by an official mid-20th century broadcaster, with the mid-Atlantic neutral accent. And I think there was more room for 'ok, what does Jacobs mean now and where have her followers or critics taken city studies from her base?' but that may be appropriate for a different sort of book, rather than the stuff of biographies.

4.    Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (fiction)

I mentioned last time my poor effort in reading Toni Morrison's Beloved in high school. The Bluest Eye is my first effort to correct for that oversight. It's an effective story about how the weight of difficulty and history and disadvantage can crush someone’s spirits and hopes even before they become an adult. The interpolating histories of the Breedlove family members', how even the most villainous characters had a burden behind them, had context to them.

It was interesting reading the foreword/afterword where Morrison comments on how she fell short, and her comments are fair, but I think she did better at conveying her point than the foreword/afterword might lead one to believe. They were also helpful at giving a window into her craft, and how she approached the theme of the story, why she made the choices she did, and what she hoped to achieve. This felt like a first novel in the sense that it was given a narrow scope, but it wasn't the typical bildungsroman that many authors begin their career with.